Currently, multiple small cells may be disposed within coverage of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) macro base station (Macro eNB), for example, a radio access point, such as a pico base station (Pico), a home eNodeB (HeNB), or a relay base station (Relay). In this way, user equipment (UE) is located in dual coverage of the macro base station and the small cell, and a maximum capacity that can be acquired by the user equipment is a sum of a capacity of the macro base station and a capacity of the small cell, Compared with user equipment in a conventional LTE macro base station network, the user equipment has a higher capacity. In a scenario, such as an office building, a shopping mall, or a school VPN, by means of heterogeneous deployment of the macro base station and the small cell, network coverage can be effectively enhanced, and spectral efficiency can be effectively improved.
In a heterogeneous network, UE can be connected only to one cell, the cell is referred to as a serving cell of the UE, and a base station may include one or more cells. Referring to FIG. 1, FIG. 1 is a flowchart of handing over user equipment to a cell according to the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, after a radio link failure (RLF) occurs in the UE, the method disclosed in this embodiment includes:
S101: User equipment sends an RRC (radio resource control) re-establishment request message to a base station B to which a target cell belongs.
S102: When the base station B receives the RRC re-establishment request message, if the base station B does not store context information of the user equipment, the base station B sends an indication message to a base station A to which the user equipment belongs, where the indication message carries indication information that requests to feed back the context information of the user equipment.
S103: The base station A sends a response message to the base station B according to the indication message, where the response message carries the context information of the user equipment.
S104: The base station B establishes a radio link connection for the user equipment in the target cell according to the RRC re-establishment request message and the context information of the user equipment.
When the user equipment in the prior art selects the target cell, mobility of the user equipment gets out of network control, which violates a basic criterion in the prior art that mobility management, such as handover of the user equipment, is determined and controlled by a network.